Posted
by
Soulskillon Tuesday December 11, 2012 @06:14PM
from the world-shark-shortage-has-cost-us dept.

gbrumfiel writes "Those hoping to laser their way out of the energy crisis will have to wait a little longer. The U.S. government has unveiled its new plan for laser fusion, and it's not going to happen anytime soon. It all comes down to problems at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), the world's most powerful laser at Lawrence Livermore Lab in California. For the past six years researchers at NIF have been trying to use the laser to spark a fusion reaction in a tiny pellet of hydrogen fuel. Like all fusion, it's tougher than it looks, and their campaign came up short. That left Congress a little bit miffed, so they asked for a new plan. The new plan calls for a more methodical study of fusion, along with a broader approach to achieving it with the NIF. In three years or so, they should know whether the NIF will ever work."

It's not even all about bombs. Yes, we know the research is going to bennefit bomb-making, but it's also a national security thing. If we can create a power plant with the immense power potential of fusion, we've effectively made a way to start weaning ourselves off of foreign energy on the fast track. Less dependency on foreign oil means we are not dependent on them. Not dependent means we can use fusion bombs without worrying about our oil supply... OK, so bombs are a pretty big part of it.

All thermonuclear weapons are fusion bombs. They have been built since the late 50s. The designs have been refined, but we don't need to research much there. The bombs we have are powerful enough for all intents and purposes.

The fusion bombs are not really fusion bombs at all. They use fusion, yes, but the majority of the explosive power still comes from fission. The fusion part is only there to increase the amount of neutrons available to increase the efficiency of the fission.

You're getting confused. You're describing what is a boosted fission device. Fusion weapons are still vastly more powerful than fission devices in the biggest bombs.

I know that various British dial-a-yield designs have at least three settings: 1) unboosted primary ~ 1.5kt, 2) boosted primary ~ 10kt, where tritium is injected into the primary to boost the number of neutrons available to increase the percentage of uranium/plutonium that gets fissioned; and 3) 1.5 Mt, where the fusion secondary is enabled.

Please uprate previous comment. It is not a troll. The NIF project is funded primarily by the NNSA, the part of the Department of Energy which deals with the science & engineering of nuclear weapons. The DoE does not dispute this, it just likes to de-emphasize the reality of the primacy of the weapons effort.

The design of the experiment and system matches the thermonuclear secondaries for weapons. Contrary to some people's belief, the nuclear physics is not difficult---it is the fluid mechanics and radiation transfer in extreme conditions which is the scientifically difficult part. (Radiation-driven secondaries are much much more difficult than fission primaries).

The primary purpose of the NIF is to gain experimental data to calibrate the simulation codes for nuclear weapons engineering & reliability in the absence of nuclear weapons testing.

There is a small energy related research project, but it is very very very far from practicality. There is little attention to actual engineering issues, compared to say ITER (magnetic confinement fusion) project, which is pretty heavily focused on engineering practicalities. Lasers are horribly inefficient energy transfer if you care about power breakeven but much better for making clean data for weapons code calibration. Most of the funded experimental runs will be for weapons, not energy research.

In any case, neither inertial confinement nor magnetic confinement fusion will be used as a power source with customers for at least 60-100 years.

We already know how to make nuclear reactors---and if we are not funding and churning out high-quality modular fission reactors now, it's foolish to think about fusion.

National SecurityHow can we ensure the nation's security without nuclear weapons testing? Maintaining the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile as a deterrent against foreign aggression has been a mainstay of national policy since the end of World War II. No new nuclear weapons are currently being built, however, and the existing weapons cannot be tested under a nuclear testing moratorium established by President George H.W. Bush in 1992. To ensure the continuing reliability of the nuclear stockpile, Lawrence Livermore and other national laboratories are developing sophisticated supercomputer simulations to determine the effects of aging on nuclear weapons components as part of the National Nuclear Security Administration's Stockpile Stewardship Program. NIF will be able to provide data for those simulations by replicating the conditions that exist inside a thermonuclear weapon. In addition, the Photon Science & Applications program is developing a number of innovative technologies for homeland security and national defense.

They then go on to claim that

By demonstrating the ability to attain fusion ignition in the laboratory, NIF will lay the groundwork for future decisions about fusion's long-term potential as a safe, virtually unlimited energy source.

but that is a byproduct, not what the NIF is designed for.

The NIF is financed out of the bomb making budget. You appear not to know that.

I suppose they are working on making commercial thorium reactors, which of course is not the same thing, but nuclear fanboys tend to mix up proposed concepts and physical reality and use it for a bait and switch.The accelerated thorium stuff does appear that it will be vastly superior to an AP1000 (first one finishing construction soon I hear) or any existing reactor. When the first research reactor of this type is built we'll know a bit more (eg. plutonium fast breeders sounded like hot shit in 1968 when

Fusion is cheaper. We are only $80bn [slashdot.org] away from a working reactor, and then the on-going costs will be lower than Thorium.

Building a viable commercial scale Thorium reactor is no small or cheap task. So far no-one has managed to run one successfully long term on even a moderate scale, and in addition there is a lot of support infrastructure to develop.

Most of us here already knew about ITER, thanks. A little more development of your thoughts (if any) would assist at this point.

What might have escaped you is that ITER, while it does a good job of covering the Tokamak approach, still isn't *guaranteed* to succeed. Or to succeed *quicker* than inertial confinement fusion (shooting lasers at pellets).

That's why it makes sense to hedge our bets with the laser approach at the NIF.

All fusion research is a toilet for flushing down money. Even if they produced a working and cheap reactor tomorrow, it still couldn't be used because it's still nuclear. Greenpeace [greenpeace.org], for example, has outright stated that they'll oppose fusion because it's nuclear. The opposition to nuclear power is ideological, thus fusion will not help.

Someone ought to inform them about the dangerous potential of Sol - that it is a huge thermonuclear device which if allowed to continue developing unchecked will destroy life on the Earth within a billion years.

One does not require a PhD in plasma physics to draw an informed conclusion on the credibility of a working group's promise to deliver results. When multiple working groups fail to succeed using a specific approach, sufficient data exists to form an opinion about the feasibility of that approach, regardless of variations & twists on the concept.

Does your "sufficient data" includes repeated funding cuts that said groups have suffered during the period, and which have (obviously) not being accounted for in the original plan for deliverables?

The most common objection to fusion funding is based on a failure to deliver on a long term projection, but basic project planning involves setting reasonable goals along the way to success that allow you to toot your horn

But were there such a reasonable goals set (and then not achieved)? For that matter, does the problem even allows for such goals, or is it basically N years of banging your head against the wall until you can finally show anything whatsoever of interest?

My original comment was tongue-in-cheek, yes, but the questions remain valid. We do keep hearing that fusion is defunded because it's underachieving, but it would be nice to hear specifics for a change.

You're a moron. Credentials matter in judging somebody's ability to comprehend and weigh the merits of research results.

And if you were educated, you'd quickly be able to find out for yourself, that for various reasons, polywell (as well as several dozen other LEF concepts) cannot possibly scale enough to work as a power plant.

Fusion is relatively easy. Ignition, on the other hand, is hard. Ignition is a controlled burn, where the heat released from fusion is used to trigger fusion in more fuel. In the case of ICF, this might mean triggering fusion in a hot spot and having a burn wave encompass the entire fuel pellet, so the entire fuel pellet is consumed with a much lower amount of input energy. This is important to actually producing fusion energy.

I dont know about the examples you give, but i cant find much about actual achievements.You have some info?

Dunno about the z-pinch, but the Bussard polywell prototypes allegedly generated some neutrons. The physics seems to be valid. The problem, as usual, is the engineering. Specifically, scaling it up. The US Navy was funding polywell research as a sort of "what if it works" deal, since it looked like it could replace nuclear fission ship propulsion, saving them a LOT of trouble and expense, but Dr. Bussard (unfortunately) has died. His research group is still around, but the Navy was pulling funding, las

As of August 15, 2012, the Navy had agreed to fund EMC2 with an additional $5.3 million over 2 years to work on the problem of pumping electrons into the whiffleball. They plan to integrate a pulsed power supply to support the electron guns (100+A, 10kV). WB-8 has been operating at 0.8 Tesla. The review of the work produced the recommendations to continue and expand the effort, stating: "The experiment

One issue with Navy funding is that they embargo the results until after the review of the final report of each stage of the work. That means the workers can't talk about how things are doing and you get a short burst of news every year or two. B-b

Last I heard of the plan the next step after WB-8 (and maybe another small model with a different symmetry), if the scaling rules worked out in practice, was to be a beyond-breakeven proof-of-concept machine with 100 MW output, for about $200M - which, if it cou

Fusor designs more primitive than the polywell have been able to generate neutrons for fifty years. What you just described sums up pretty much every fusion idea: it is easy to build a tabletop version, really easy to get some neutrons, but then there are big issues with scaling it up. It all comes down to whether new instabilities and limits appear as you increase the size and power, and working out the scaling. Pretty much every generation of things like tokamaks and other designs are testing this, fin

Some of the most technically challenging bits of ITER are being procured by the US. ITER has a deliberate policy of spreading the IP and manufacturing capability around its member states. That's why it's costing 3 to 4 times as much as it strictly needs to cost.

If we're suggesting words to stop using, I would like to nominate "boffin". A "boffin" is the term that a British journalist, apparently unable to distinguish an astronomer from a geologist, uses to describe someone who uses their brain in their job (as opposed to a British journalist).

If we're suggesting words to stop using, I would like to nominate "boffin". A "boffin" is the term that a British journalist, apparently unable to distinguish an astronomer from a geologist, uses to describe someone who uses their brain in their job (as opposed to a British journalist).

He says, on a site billed as "News for Nerds." Like it or not, astronomers and geologists (and scientists of all kinds) have a lot more in common professionally with each other than they do with journalists, or politicians, or anyone outside the field; having a word that covers that particular group of people seems reasonable enough.

Heh. "Boffin" usually refers not just to scientists, but to engineers as well, and sometimes to, well, nerds in general. And unlike "nerd," it's not a pejorative when someone outside that world uses it. So you know, why not?

John Nuckolls, the guy that pretty much single-handedly drove ICF research through LLNL, was presented with this problem when the concept was first seriously presented in the early 1960s. At the time he thought the fuel loads could be sprayed from an atomizer and costs fractions of a cent. The next 50 years of experimentation conclusively demonstrated this is *simply not possible*. Not "it's an engineering problem", but "not possible". Curing the Rayleigh instabilities requires target perfection that costs thousands of dollars a shot. And those shots can only ever return pennies worth of power.

Do the math yourself. And when you do, compare it to current wind prices at 5 to 6 cents/kWh, solar around 10 to 15, or hydro at 1 to 2. There's more than enough of those three to produce every erg used on the planet, and they actually work, right now.

Hydro isn't available in most places. How do you want to maintain power on those weeks that are overcast and windless? I don't know how to avoid the need to have capacity from nuclear and fossil fuels to meet 100% of demand for those weeks.

> So what you're saying is that we already know everything, and there is nothing left to discover or improve?

No, I'm saying precisely what I said...

After studying the problem for 50 years, we know that the targets costs are orders of magnitude more than the price of the electrical power they could produce. We also know that the price/performance ratio is fixed; that is, if you want more performance, you need to pay more money.

The conclusion is that there is no way the system can produce economical power.

If we want to get serious about global warming, we have to make mining and burning coal a capital offense, and shut down every mine and plant with the urgency of eliminating the slave trade.

Instead, even eco-minded Germany is ramping up coal production and consumption because they started shutting down their reactors. There is a *new* 2200 MW coal burning plant in Germany. They foolishly believe that the competition is between nuclear and wind, and prefer wind (I do, but it's not remotely enough), and find that when actual joules have to be counted to keep the lights going, the coal gets burned.

That's a great plan if you want to kill just about as many people as global warming will(possibly more).

Fundamentally the survival of modern humanity is dependent on our access to energy. With access to sufficient energy we an survive most anything(including a 5 degree temperature rise, heck we even know how to destroy nuclear waste if we have enough energy to do it), without it, we're pretty well boned. Now I'd love to see coal phased out as soon as is humanly possible, but in a world where nuclear is off the table in most places and base load renewable energy is still unproven as far as I'm aware, we don't have that luxury. What we need is something which can replace coal without forcing us to drastically reduce either the reliability or supply of electricity. All indications are that fusion might be the energy holy grail, and we're going to need one.

Fusion is off the table because it doesn't work yet. If you're asking why nuclear is off the table it's because a large part of the left is off in a 1960's flower power fantasy land and wouldn't consider nuclear power under any circumstances and a large part of the right is off in a 1950's fantasy land and doesn't see anything wrong with burning fossil fuels as fast as we can forever. This essentially is why nothing gets done on climate change period, the left won't accept any of the viable solutions and th

I looked at your graph, and the only message it conveys is that someone pulled the idea out of their rear that if we spent more money on fusion research we'd get somewhere, and invented numbers for the investment required and when results would be achieved.

I mean, those curves? They look like a kid scribbling with crayon. There's no iron-clad guarantee that *any* level of investment will lead to a practical fusion reactor. The only serious notion to be derived from that plot is that current US investment

There was no iron clad guarantee that the Iraq war would be a success (and by many measures, it's been a complete waste of time) but we still went ahead and spent $800bn on it anyway (the direct cost to the DOD, the actual complete costs are probably much greater).

Oh, I'm *all* for investing money into fusion--don't get me wrong. I think the Polywell should get its $200M to build a scaled up prototype, that tokamak fusion should be supported at 10x current levels, that the Superconducting Supercollider ought not to have been cancelled, research into how to get people into space long term (right now people in space is mostly just pissed-away money), PUBLIC research with results FREELY AVAILABLE into better, more drought/salt/disease resistant food crops, and more med

Tiny compared to most things on day-to-day human scales. Here's an image [wikipedia.org] of the pellet.

As for the reaction itself (and I probably have this wrong, so please correct me if you discover so) it would, best-case, generate 100-150 MJ, but I read the target chamber's design only allows for 45 MJ (realistic expectations, I suppose?) That amounts to 11 kg of TNT (yes this is all paraphrased from Wikipedia.) Certainly tiny by the standards of fusion/fission, but quite huge considering the pellet above.

This might not seem like much, but it is a demonstrative design. Going for designs that would produce a practical commercial system at appreciable outputs would have been astronomically more expensive. Better to prove the concept first. Still more, this is a dual purpose facility; it's primary objective is stockpile stewardship. The potential for fusion research for commercial purposes is just added value.

The NIF is physically limited to shots up to about 50 MJ. To put that in more familiar terms, that's about 14 kWh.

At current baseload prices here in Ontario, about 3.5 cents/kWh, that shot is worth about 50 cents. That's assuming that we convert it entire to electricity, which is of course impossible. A more realistic conversion with 25% thermal efficiency gets

Although the funding and research at the NIF is no doubt aimed towards weapons research, its recent detour to support the National Ignition Campaign was basically a pork barrel project designed to channel federal stimulus money into california. For example, this earmark [washingtonwatch.com] among others. The funding was sold to other congressfolk as them voting for an alternative energy research program, and now that the results of the campaign have been spotlighted as a failure, they of course are wondering what they voted f

What, did you think NIF was actually going to be producing power? I assume you also class JET [wikipedia.org] as a total failure for not producing cost-effective energy, then.

And that 'fusion will never happen' article cold be summed up as "D-T fusion is the easiest so is used in research reactors, and so must also be used in commercial reactors, and it has a bunch of problems in tokamaks, so fusion will never happen", happily ignoring a-neutronic fusion entirely, as well as other forms of confinement than purely magneti

Hello, I'm sorry to say this, but aneutronic fusion is probably never going to be a practical energy source.

There's a reason D-T fusion is the focus. One problem is that all the aneutronic fusion reactions involve higher-Z (higher atomic number) nuclei. Higher Z nuclei have worse energy loss via Bremsstrahlung radiation than the D-T or D-D reactions. In a plasma hot enough to sustain fusion reactions, the electrons and ions are banging against each other, and every hit potentially makes X-rays or gamma rays, converting thermal energy into light. In a reasonable-sized thermal plasma, these photons pretty much just leave without interacting again, thus cooling the plasma.

People have calculated that the energy loss rate from Bremsstrahlung in a thermal plasma composed of atoms capable of doing aneutronic fusion would exceed the rate that the fusion reactions would heat it. Thus, the plasma would cool right off, the flame would in effect "go out" because it would lose heat faster than it created heat via fusion.

In a star, this works out, because a star is so very, very big that the photons from Bremsstrahlung are re-captured within the star: i.e., the heat can't escape because of sheer mass in the way. We're never going to pull that size and density off in a lab or an engineering installation.

Now, if you can somehow arrange for the plasma to NOT be thermal, you may be able to beat this issue. However, keeping a plasma from thermalizing requires a large energy input, and is very hard to arrange for and preserve long enough to get energy from fusions. Inertial confinement might work (laser or Z-pinch or the like), there you potentially have very high densities for maybe "long enough" for Bremsstrahlung not to eat your lunch: I don't know. However, both laser and Z-type installations seem very hard engineering problems.

The wikipedia on "aneutronic fusion" discusses these issues some as well.

Anyway, that's one reason most are happily ignoring aneutronic fusion entirely. Another is that much higher temperatures are required for the aneutronic fusion reactions, and we haven't even got D-T going yet and that is the lowest temperature fusion reaction. D-T is where I would put my money, too, given the results of the physics calculations.

Fusion is fundamentally possible. We know this because solar, wind, wave, and for that matter pretty damned near every other energy source we have was originally generated by the gigantic fusion reactor we call the Sun. There's still some question as to whether we can manage sustainable fusion, and some even bigger questions about this particular methodology, but the payoff if we succeed is pretty damned massive.

Fusion is easy at the stellar scale, since gravity takes care of both ignition and containment. On a smaller scale, we'll have to build and maintain machines for that which costs money. How much is hard to predict when we're still in the prototype stage, but there is no guarantee that fusion power will be cheaper than existing forms of power generation.

Cheaper isn't really all that important in the long run a positive output of course is, but while nearly free energy would be excellent a clean relatively limitless supply of expensive energy is a lot better than a cheap supply of incredibly dirty or limited energy, as the other two options get a lot more expensive over time.

Solar power can't be our primary energy source because it requires covering huge areas with collectors, and no matter where you'll put them they're always in someone's back yard, or spoil someone's view, or destroy some sand bug's habitat.

You are assuming that we won't get the efficiency of solar panels and batteries up, or use dry sterile lands for our collectors. There's a lot of desert out there and we already have the grids to distribute energy from anywhere to everywhere (almost).
Just image the creation of a cheap solar panels that are also roof tiles. Every single home could potentially be it's own power source in the future, and if we're going to survive as a species, I sure hope it doesn't come down to "Oh well our view is better wi

When has anything funded by the Federal Government not been on a 'slow burn?' The only things that have ever been fast-tracked are things that are seen as expedient by the masses, like going to the moon. But, did we go to the moon for scientific purposes? Nope. We went to beat the Red Menace, and for no other reason. NASA just happened to, you know, get science stuff done while they were there.
Wake me up when clean energy becomes a politically expedient necessity for EVERY PARTY. Then things will happen.

until we can blow up the sun at will military minds will keep wanting bigger bombs let them keep developing though lots of our current civilian tech is derived from military research. Besides if they don't pour it into research they will look for places to spend it, or rather places to blow up.

until we can blow up the sun at will military minds will keep wanting bigger bombs let them keep developing though lots of our current civilian tech is derived from military research. Besides if they don't pour it into research they will look for places to spend it, or rather places to blow up.

I think you could probably pay for a year's worth of Polywell or Focus Fusion research with just the budget for coffeebreaks at the NIF

But you will get more scientific results out of the coffee breaks at NIF that you will out of Polywell. Polywell are very good reasons why the scientific community isn't wasting their time with it beyond using it as a cheap neutron source.